[GSoC] Control panel proposal

Magdalena Nowak lena.m.nowak at gmail.com
Thu Apr 5 07:10:01 CDT 2012


Hi, my name is Magdalena Nowak and I'd like to apply for this year's
Summer of Code with Wine. My proposal is to merge the two control
panel suggestions (Tools - Merge winecfg and control panel and Tools -
Implement new control panel applets) into one project.

I would start off with splitting winecfg into several applets.
Roughly, each tab would become a new applet. The Applications applet
would only be used to register applications with the control panel to
allow the user to specify custom settings for that application. I
would like to merge the Graphics tab with the Appearance section of
Desktop Integration (and this applet would be the place where the 3D
settings would go later) and merge the Folders section with the Drives
tab into one applet.

Later on, I will start implementing new applets. For example, create a
Networking applet for the network-related settings, maybe a simple
diagnostics tool (a read-only applet with information regarding build
options and system resources), Fonts (both list of fonts available to
Wine as well as hinting and DPI settings), a System applet for
settings like owner name, Windows version, libraries etc.

There is a problem with per-application settings. I have three
possible solutions to this problem. I have made pictures to illustrate
what I mean.

One would be to simply add a drop-down list to each applet that
contains settings that can be per-application settings. The drop-down
list would contain a "global" entry, as well as entries for each
application registered through the Applications applet. Upon selecting
an entry, the applet would load the settings for this program.

The second solution would be to have a separate applet for
per-application settings. The screens would be stored in a DLL, for
example, as to avoid duplication.

The third, and my favourite, solution, is to create a virtual control
panel for each registered application. The user would be able to
select the application or global settings from some kind of list, and
the applets would be passed an argument to indicate the selected
application. If a specific setting was global-only, it would be
highlighted appropriately.

Here are the promised images:
http://imgur.com/T4pUV - Showing the drop-down menu at the top of the
applet window.
http://imgur.com/vA1Vq - Showing the per-application settings applet.
http://imgur.com/is63I - Showing the control panel with an application
selected, and a Graphics applet showing a global-only setting.

Of course these are only examples, I welcome any comments. I will post
a proposal on Melange soon.

Yours,
'Lena.



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